Render times for standard non-3d video?
Lots of speculation, so I decided to do some some tests on the sequencer performance:



Performance Options

Global Prefetch set to 30frames, 4096MB of cache, AVI JPEG 50% quality: 2m28s

+ UI Locked and no image Display: 2m28s

+ Sound track caching, MPEG seek per-track set to 60 rather than 25: 2m28s

+ Immediate re-render, to test for effect of disk caching: 2m28s

Conclusion 1: Surprisingly, none of the performance-enhancing options seems to do anything.



Encoding Options

Same setting as above, AVI JPEG: 2m28s

+ Encoding set to Quicktime H264 @ 50% quality: 4m08s

+ Quicktime H264 @ 75% quality: 4m02s

+ Quicktime H264 @ 95% quality: 4m11s

+ Encoding set to FFMPEG H264, H264 Preset @ 600kbit: 8m18s

+ Encoding set to AVI RAW: 1m58s

Conclusion 2: The encoding engine makes a huge difference in speed. AVI RAW is the fastest if you have the disk speed to back it up. FFMPEG H264 is the slowest.



Quality Options

+ With antialiasing, AVI RAW: 1m58s

+ without antialiasing, AVI RAW: 1m18s

Conclusion 3: Antialiasing makes a difference, but the quality loss is huge, especially when all the input clips have different resolution.



Test Details:

Scene used: 2000 frame long sequencer with 6 different 720p MPEG4 video input, 3 1080p PNG sequence inputs, dozens of images, dozens of transitions, 1 audio track. Output is 720p with Antialiasing.

Test Methodology: System is restarted after each test, so the effect of disk cache is minimal.

Test system: 2.2Ghz i7 Macbook Pro, 8GB RAM, Radeon HD6750, 500GB SSD